His hiring raises the question of whether Apple's growing AI team will take a more academic approach to AI research going forward. One of the big reasons why people believe that Apple is falling behind in the field is that Apple's researchers don't publish their research, because Apple has traditionally kept its methods secret until a new product is launched. That secretive approach may be hampering Apple's recruiting efforts in the AI field, where many of the top researchers want to see their work published.

By contrast, Google and its AI subsidiary, DeepMind, publish their research all the time. Facebook's head of AI research, Yann LeCun, still puts his name on papers, including one (Recurrent Orthogonal Networks and Long-Memory Tasks) from June of this year, that are frequently published on Facebook's research page.

Apple did not immediately return a request for comment about what Salakhutdinov will be working on in his new role, though the company has numerous products with obvious artificial intelligence needs, from its Siri virtual assistant to self-driving cars.

One of his recent talks discusses deep learning model that could be used to, say, write captions for various photos, a similar task to a new photo feature Apple introduced in the latest version of the iPhone software. His most recent paper discusses ways that machines can understand text and other documents.